New Gop Uneasy Fit For Dole

DAVID BRODER

April 19, 1995|DAVID BRODER Washington Post Writers Group

If deference is the force it is reputed to be in the Republican electorate, then Bob Dole deserves to be called the favorite for the 1996 presidential nomination. In addition to the respect he commands for his valor in combat and for the courage he displays daily in coping with his war wounds, the senator from Kansas has carried more water for the GOP than anyone else in today's politics. From his unhappy stint as chairman of the Republican National Committee during Watergate and his run as vice-presidential candidate with Gerald Ford in the uphill 1976 race to his dutiful labors as Senate minority leader for President Bush, the man who had defeated him for the nomination in 1988, Dole has earned his party's gratitude.

Politics has been his life and, at 71, Dole finally seems due for his reward. He is the majority leader of the Senate and, for the first time, leads the pre-presidential year polls for his party's nomination. Many in both parties would be happy to see Dole achieve his goal.

But the barriers between Dole and the acceptance speech in San Diego are higher than many suppose. Set aside the honors and the titles he has earned; look at the Bob Dole both Kansas and Washington know. What is evident is that he in no way reflects the Republican Party of today. He did not create it; he does not define it or embody it; and if he leads it into the next election, it will only be because he and the party have wrenched themselves out of shape.

By age, geography and temperament, Dole is, as my colleague Lou Cannon has written, an Eisenhower Republican. The World War II general and two-term president, his fellow-Kansan, is Dole's political hero. But Eisenhower is a dim memory to today's Republican activists. The Main Street, Midwest-Northeast-based party he led when Dole began his political career, with its Abe Lincoln commitment to civil rights and its Wendell Willkie-Wall Street internationalism, has been transformed three times, each time moving further from the concept of Republicanism Dole finds comfortable.

Richard Nixon brought the first change, relying on a "Southern strategy" which exploited the civil rights backlash and the newly discovered issue of law and order. Dole, a civil rights backer, was uncomfortable but went along--until the White House lawbreaking proved too repellent.

Then came Ronald Reagan, who not only cemented the South and its Bible Belt views, but brought in supply-side economics, a tax-cutting, budget-busting doctrine that Dole treated with naked contempt, and which he tried his best to combat from his position of influence in the Senate. Today, that doctrine holds sway, with many promising not just to cut income taxes but to abolish them.

And now have come Newt Gingrich and the Contract, drawing energy partly from a Christian conservative movement which Dole never previously courted and even more from a neo-populist, term-limits kind of fervor that is fiercely hostile to the Washington where Dole has served proudly and comfortably for these 35 years.

On his opening swing as a declared candidate last week, Dole did his damndest to sound as if this radically redesigned Republicanism was his natural home. He signed a pledge never to raise taxes. He reiterated his support for prayer in schools. He took a leaf from Dan Quayle's book and bashed Hollywood smut and violence. He denounced affirmative action. He tried his best to sound like one of Gingrich's true-believer, tear-it-down-and-start-from-scratch freshman acolytes, not the tried and true deal-maker who has joined with Democrats so often to patch and repair the aging government machinery they took over from the New Deal generation.

The "new Dole" rhetoric worked well enough on the stump. But Dole is a man of government as well as a candidate, and it is hard to see how he can sustain his act on the floor of the Senate - especially with Sen. Phil Gramm, his rival for the nomination, and other Gingrich-brand conservatives eager to raise the ante for him. If he tries to meet their policy demands, he risks being driven further and further from his natural allies - especially committee chairmen like Sens. Pete Domenici, Bob Packwood, Nancy Kassebaum and John Chafee, who are moderates on social policy and determined to reduce the budget deficit. The tax and budget questions, the welfare issue and, more immediately, the nomination of Dr. Henry Foster Jr. as surgeon general all threaten to make life miserable for Dole in coming months, if he tries to make his voting record as much in tune with Gramm and Gingrich as his new campaign speeches sound.

His time may have come. But his kind of Republican Party may be gone.

Write to David Broder at The Washington Post, 1150 15th St. NW, Washington, D.C. 20071.